Masters of the '16 candidate domains

The land grab in cyberspace for ClintonCuomo.com, RubioChristie.com and other potential 2016 candidacies is already under way as speculators — and some candidates — snap up Internet addresses.

Rick Santorum already tipped his hand by buying RickSantorum2016.com, RickSantorum2016 .net and Santorum2016.net. But some campaigns pay extra to mask publicly available data about Internet domain name ownership, so it’s unclear whether Christie2016.com, ElizabethWarren2016.com or JoeBiden2016.com were registered by speculators or the candidates and their allies.

On the Web, politics depends on buying the right domain name, or URL. “It’s something to easily remember to type in,” said Karl Frisch, a digital campaign strategist who worked for Howard Dean’s 2004 technologically groundbreaking presidential bid. “It’s more important for the candidate than having a year associated with it. Let’s say Jeb Bush were to win in 2016, he’s not going to use that URL in 2020. It’s better to have a URL that’s timeless.”

Data on domain ownership are publicly available on the index site Whois.com. But poking through Whois for tea leaves on who is planning a presidential run is mostly a fruitless game.

The morning after President Barack Obama won reelection, an attorney in Lyndhurst, Ohio, Andrew Samtoy, got a bright idea — and hopped online to snap up ChristieKasich.com for $10. By that point, however, he was way behind the cybersquatting curve. ClintonCuomo.com, Ayotte2016.com, RubioChristie.com, SantorumBush.com and countless other permutations of possible tickets had long since been bought, often by profiteers imagining the day a campaign operative comes a-calling offering fistfuls of cash — or maybe just a handshake from an admired candidate — in exchange for the Web real estate.

Yet in this era of smartphones and social media, such paydays or moments of personal outreach are increasingly less likely. Modern campaigns typically pick just one main domain for their campaign, usually the contender’s name if it’s easy to obtain, and brand it on everything from podium signs to bumper stickers. Once the candidate’s site is populated by volunteer information, Twitter and Facebook links, donation buttons and biographies, it easily rises to the top of Google searches to ensure people looking for it that way can find it.

“I haven’t run across a case where we were beholden to anybody,” said Josh Ross, owner of Trilogy Interactive, which handled the Web operations for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 bid. “The first thing we do before we engage the client is look at the domain name registry to see what their situation is. Smart campaigns, even if they’re not planning on running, register everything to prevent other people from doing it.”

Campaign operatives agree that the “marquee” domain — just their name, such as Barack Obama.com or BobbyJindal.com — is critically important for a candidate to own. Variations that include years, names of offices and possible running mates are too infinite to proactively buy.

“These sharks are looking three or four years down the line buying the names of anyone who has even a speck of a chance of running for something,” said Vincent Harris, digital campaign manager for Allen West, Linda McMahon, Newt Gingrich and Ted Cruz. “At some point you realize that if someone wants to put up a nasty hit-site on you, they’re going to find one. You can’t purchase everything.”